Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

by Carol Tavris

A dog may appear contrite for having been caught peeing on the carpet, but she will not try to think up justifications for her misbehavior. Humans think—and because we think, dissonance theory demonstrates, our behavior transcends the effects of rewards and punishments and often contradicts them.

severe initiations increase a member’s liking for the group. A stunning example of the justification of effort in real life came from an observational study done in the multicultural nation of Mauritius.7 The annual Hindu festival of Thaipusam includes two rituals: a low-ordeal ritual involving singing and collective prayer, and a severe-ordeal ritual called kavadi.

What they do mean is that if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or a painful experience in order to attain some

goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.

This frequently replicated finding explains why it is so difficult for scientists and health experts to persuade people who are ideologically or politically committed to a belief—such as “climate change is a hoax”—to change their minds even when overwhelming evidence dictates that they should. People who receive disconfirming or otherwise unwelcome information often do not simply resist it; they may come to support their original (wrong) opinion even more strongly—a backfire effect. Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work.

proselytize.

People become more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it.

The more costly a decision in terms of time, money, effort, or inconvenience, and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made.

Seeking an explanation for this unexpected pattern, Kahn discovered dissonance theory, which was just getting attention at the time, and realized it could beautifully account for his results. Because the students thought they had gotten the technician in serious trouble, they had to justify their actions by convincing themselves that he deserved it, thus increasing their anger—and their blood pressure.

Their cognition that they went out of their way to do a favor for this person is dissonant with any negative feelings they might have had about him. In effect, after doing the favor, they ask themselves: “Why would I do something nice for a jerk? Therefore, he’s not as big a jerk as I thought he was—as a matter of fact, he is a pretty decent guy who deserves a break.”

“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”

hundreds of studies have shown that, compared to predictions based on actuarial data, predictions based on an expert’s years of training and personal experience are rarely better than chance. But when an expert is wrong, the centerpiece of his or her professional identity is threatened. Therefore, dissonance theory predicts that the more self-confident and famous experts are, the less likely they will be to admit mistakes.

Our convictions about who we are carry us through the day, and we are constantly interpreting the things that happen to us through the filter of those core beliefs.

Indeed, several experiments find that most people who have low self-esteem or a low estimate of their abilities do feel uncomfortable with dissonant successes and dismiss them as accidents or anomalies.

Dissonance reduction, therefore, will protect high self-esteem or low self-esteem, whichever is central to a person’s core self-concept.

The one who didn’t cheat considers the other to be totally immoral, and the one who cheated thinks the other is hopelessly puritanical. This process illustrates how people who have been sorely tempted, battled temptation, and almost given in to it—but resisted at the eleventh hour—come to dislike, even despise, those who did not succeed in the same effort. It’s the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.

In Milgram’s original version, two-thirds of the participants administered what they thought were life-threatening levels of electric shock to another person simply because the experimenter kept saying, “The experiment requires that you continue.” This experiment is almost always described as a study of obedience to authority. Indeed it is. But it is more than that; it is also a demonstration of long-term results of self-justification.36

The Milgram experiment shows us how ordinary people can end up doing immoral and harmful things through a chain reaction of behavior and subsequent self-justification. When we, as observers, look at them in puzzlement or dismay, we fail to realize that we are often looking at the end of a long, slow process down that pyramid. At his sentencing, Magruder said to Judge John Sirica: “I know what I have done, and Your Honor knows what I have done. Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass.” How do you get an honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step at a time, and self-justification will do the rest.

Along with the confirmation bias, the brain comes packaged with other self-serving habits that allow us to justify our own perceptions and beliefs as being accurate, realistic, and unbiased. Social psychologist Lee Ross calls this phenomenon “naïve realism,” the inescapable conviction that we perceive objects and events clearly, “as they really are.”2 We assume that other reasonable people see things the same way we do. If they disagree with us, they obviously aren’t seeing clearly.

We believe our own judgments are less biased and more independent than those of others partly because we rely on introspection to tell us what we are thinking and feeling, but we have no way of knowing what others are truly thinking.

We take our own involvement in an issue as a source of accuracy and enlightenment

but we regard such personal feelings on the part of others who hold different views as a source of bias

Who would jeopardize a career and reputation for a trip to Scotland? No one, if that was the first offer, but many of us would if that offer had been preceded by several smaller ones that we had accepted. Pride, followed by self-justification, paves the road to Scotland.

Another way to measure the subtle effects of sponsorship is by comparing the results of studies funded independently and those funded by industry, which consistently reveal a funding bias.

The reason Big Pharma spends so much on small gifts as well as the big ones is well known to marketers, lobbyists, and social psychologists: being given a gift evokes an implicit desire to reciprocate.

once reciprocity kicks in, self-justification will follow: “I’ve always wanted a copy of the Bhagavad Gita; what is it, exactly?” The power of the flower is unconscious. “It’s only a flower,” the traveler says. “It’s only a pizza,” the medical resident says. “It’s only a small donation for an educational symposium,” the physician says. Yet the power of the flower is one reason that the amount of contact doctors have with pharmaceutical representatives is positively correlated with the cost of the drugs the doctors later prescribe.

Objectivity is a myth,’ [bioethicist Evan] DeRenzo told me, marshaling arguments from feminist philosophy to bolster her cause. ‘I don’t think there is a person alive who is engaged in an activity who has absolutely no interest in how it will turn out.’” There’s a clever dissonance-reducing claim for you—“Perfect objectivity is impossible anyway, so I might as well accept that consulting fee.”

participants liked the nonsense syllables more when they were linked with in-group words than with any other word.

The very act of thinking that they are not as smart or reasonable as we are makes us feel closer to others who are like us. But, just as crucially, it allows us to justify how we treat them. Most people assume that stereotyping causes discrimination; Al Campanis, believing that blacks lack the “necessities” to be managers, refused to hire one. But the theory of cognitive dissonance shows that the path between attitudes and action runs in both directions. Often it is discrimination that evokes the self-justifying stereotype; Al Campanis, lacking the will or guts to convince the Dodger organization to hire a black manager, justified his failure to act by telling himself that blacks couldn’t do the job anyway. In the same way, if we have enslaved members of another group, deprived them of decent educations or jobs, kept them from encroaching on our professional turfs, or denied them their human rights, then we invoke stereotypes about them to justify our actions. By persuading ourselves that they are unworthy, unteachable, incompetent, inherently math-challenged, immoral, sinful, stupid, or even subhuman, we avoid feeling guilty or unethical about how we treat them.

Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it.

Jeffrey Sherman and his colleagues have done a series of experiments that demonstrate the effort that highly prejudiced people are prepared to put into maintaining consonance between their prejudices and information that is inconsistent with it.

Social psychologists Chris Crandall and Amy Eshelman, reviewing the huge research literature, found that whenever people are emotionally depleted—when they are sleepy, frustrated, angry, anxious, drunk, or stressed—they become more willing to express their real prejudices.

But most people are unhappy about believing it, and that creates dissonance: “I dislike those people” collides with an equally strong conviction that it is morally or socially wrong to say so.

Participants successfully control their negative feelings under normal conditions, but as soon as they become angry or frustrated or when their self-esteem wobbles, they express their prejudice directly because now they can justify it: “I’m not a bad or prejudiced person, but, hey—he insulted me!”

Our greatest hope of self-correction lies in making sure we are not operating in a hall of mirrors, in which all we see are distorted reflections of our own desires and convictions. We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power.

As long as we are convinced that we are completely objective, above corruption, and immune to prejudice, most of us from time to time will find ourselves on our own personal road to St. Andrews—and some of us will be on that plane to Bangkok.

In the final analysis, Magruder said, no one forced him or the others to break the law. “We could have objected to what was happening or resigned in protest,” he wrote.44 “Instead, we convinced ourselves that wrong was right, and plunged ahead. “There is no way to justify burglary, wiretapping, perjury, and all the other elements of the cover-up . . . I and others rationalized illegal actions on the grounds of ‘politics as usual’ or ‘intelligence gathering’ or ‘national security.’ We were completely wrong, and only when we have admitted that and paid the public price of our mistakes can we expect the public at large to have much faith in our government or our political system.”

At the simplest level, memory smooths out the wrinkles of dissonance by enabling the confirmation bias to hum along, selectively causing us to forget discrepant, disconfirming information about beliefs we hold dear.

” That is why memory researchers love to quote Nietzsche: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.”

“The most likely thing, I fear,” McCarthy concludes, “is that I fused two memories”—the tale of the missing butterfly and the teacher’s subsequent explanation of what might have happened.6 And it made psychological sense: Uncle Myers’s planting of the butterfly under the tablecloth was consonant with McCarthy’s feelings about his overall malevolence and further justified her righteous indignation about being unfairly punished.

we tell our stories in the confidence that the listener will not dispute them or ask for disconfirming evidence, which means we rarely have an incentive to scrutinize them for accuracy.

we tell a story, we tend to leave ourselves out: My father did thus-and-such because of who he was, not because of the kind of kid I was. That’s the self-justification of memory. And it is why, when we learn that a memory is wrong, we feel stunned, disoriented, as if the ground under us has shifted. In a sense, it has. It has made us rethink our own role in the story.

Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably with their regrets and imperfections.

By far the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives.

In a series of experiments, Barbara Tversky and Elizabeth Marsh showed how we “spin the stories of our lives.” In one, people read a story about two roommates, both of whom did something annoying and something sociable. Then everyone was asked to write a letter about one of the roommates, either a letter of complaint to a housing authority or a letter of recommendation to a social club. As they wrote, the study participants added elaborations and details to their letters that had not been part of the original story. For example, if they were writing a recommendation, they might add, “Rachel is bubbly.” Later, when they were asked to recall the original story as accurately as possible, their memories had become biased in the direction of the letter they had written.7 They remembered the false details they had added and forgot the dissonant information they had not written about.

If a memory is a central part of your identity, a self-serving distortion is even more likely.

Conway and Ross referred to this self-serving memory distortion as “getting what you want by revising what you had.” On the

larger stage of life, many of us do just that: We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved so that we’ll feel better about ourselves now.13 Of course, all of us do grow and mature, but generally not as much as we think. This bias in memory explains why each of us feels that we have changed profoundly, but our friends, enemies, and loved ones are the same old friends, enemies, and loved ones they ever were.

So, no, Wilkomirski and Andrews are not crazy or deceitful, but their memories are false, and false for particular, self-justifying reasons. Their stories, so different on the face of it, are linked by common psychological and neurological mechanisms that can create false memories that nonetheless feel vividly, emotionally real. These memories do not develop overnight, in a blinding flash. They take months, sometimes years, to develop, and the stages by which they emerge are now well known to psychological scientists.

“imagination inflation,”